Six years ago, my colleagues at the Center for Youth Development and Education and I wanted to help struggling high school students and out-of-school youth gain the skills necessary to learn, to finish high school, and to successfully compete at the post-secondary level. As a division of the Commonwealth Corporation—a state-chartered nonprofit organization dedicated to work force development—the Center develops projects to help young people gain the education and skills necessary to make the transition from school to the workplace. Our approach—the Diploma Plus program—is still a work in progress, but we have learned important lessons about what does and doesn't work.
We began discussing program design in 1995 with two Boston community-based programs that wanted to pilot the program: Greater Egleston Community High School and the University High School at Action for Boston Community Development. We asked ourselves, How can we construct a program that will help young people ages 16 to 22 who have been unsuccessful in a traditional high school setting not only learn, but also do so at an accelerated pace? These students were either enrolled in an alternative high school or GED program, had dropped out of school, or were struggling in a public high school—often years behind their graduating class in credits.
Diploma Plus has since been implemented at 10 sites. Two community-based satellite programs operate under agreement with the local public schools to grant regular diplomas. Four sites are alternative high schools—two are managed by community organizations (one is a district-affiliated charter school and the other is a district pilot school), and two are alternative schools operated by school districts. One GED program redesigned itself to offer a diploma option, two schools-within-schools operate at Boston public high schools, and one community college works with two nearby public school districts. All but one of the sites receive financial or staffing support from school districts.
All students who successfully complete the program receive regular high school diplomas, but because the program is evaluated in different settings, the day-to-day relationship with the public schools varies—some sites have a great deal of autonomy and others receive close district oversight. Most Diploma Plus teachers are employed by the school system, but some teachers at satellite programs are employed by the community agencies that run them. All teachers receive specialized training.
More than 600 students are enrolled in Diploma Plus across Massachusetts. Teacher assessments and standardized tests indicate that most of these young people enter the Diploma Plus program with reading, writing, and numeracy skills at the 7th to 9th grade levels. The students are overwhelmingly youth of color and come from poor economic backgrounds. Many speak English as a second language. Although recruitment practices vary, almost all students have chosen to apply for enrollment in the program. Program staff members interview each candidate and conduct an intake assessment.
Guiding Principles
With this student population in mind, we designed the program around the following principles.
Establish high expectations. Our goal is to prepare students to succeed in postsecondary education and to help them earn a credential, such as an associate's or bachelor's degree or a technical training certificate. To do so, we must establish a shared culture of high expectations among students, staff, and community partners.
Make teaching and learning exciting. Young people learn better when teachers use a variety of instructional approaches. We emphasize teaching and learning strategies that have a meaningful context for students and are as active and applied as possible.
Assess progress toward graduation on the basis of performance, not on seat time or Carnegie Units. Our goal is to help students accelerate their learning, and we focus all teaching and learning—including progress toward graduation—on what students demonstrate they can do. No one graduates from a Diploma Plus site just for showing up.
Build ongoing assessment into all aspects of the program. We have a set of specific academic and life-skill competencies. At any time, Diploma Plus students and their teachers can assess where students are in relationship to mastering these competencies. The Diploma Plus competencies reflect the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and national standards and are grouped by grade levels—8th, 10th, and 12th.
Build in challenging postsecondary experiences as part of earning a high school diploma. To prepare at-risk students for experiences beyond high school, we expose students to college and the workplace. Such experiences are new, challenging, and sometimes intimidating, but we support and encourage the students.
The Diploma Plus Program
In the program's first stage—the presentation level—students acquire core skills in reading comprehension, math reasoning, writing, and critical thinking. Teachers offer hands-on, inquiry-based instruction, and students explore their communities and workplaces as extensions of classroom learning. Because Diploma Plus is performance-driven, students advance through the program as they demonstrate mastery of specific competencies. We evaluate competence through student performance, such as explaining a science experiment; products, such as writing a good persuasive essay; teacher observation, such as observing a student's analytical skills; and assessments, such as teacher-designed tests, standardized tests, and a portfolio that reflects students' best work across subject areas.
We do not require a set time period for students to complete the presentation level. Typically, students take about two years to achieve the competencies of the presentation level, which are benchmarked up to a 10th grade level. But the speed at which students complete the presentation level depends on the level of skill they bring to the program and how hard they work once they enroll. We encourage students to extend their learning beyond the 25 to 30 hours a week that they spend in classes and school-based activities. In addition to homework, students work with mentors and tutors on specific skills both during and after school hours and meet with teachers and other adults in the community before and after school to work on other learning requirements.
In the second stage of the program—the plus phase—we present students with challenging transitional experiences. Students enroll in one or more courses at local community colleges for credit and participate in structured internships. At the same time, students participate in a senior seminar of no more than 10 students. With guidance from the senior seminar leader—a teacher who has agreed to take on case-management responsibilities—the students fulfill additional academic requirements. These requirements include three major projects: an autobiography that traces each student's roots and future goals, a community action project, and an exploration of the industry in which the student is interning. All these projects involve significant primary and secondary research, written products, and final presentations or exhibitions.
As a result of their experiences, students who previously were at risk of dropping out of high school or who were already out of school without a diploma are able to graduate with a regular high school diploma—not a GED—and they raise their academic skills significantly in the process. They also gain work experience relevant to their career interests and earn college credits that apply toward a college degree.
The Peace Garden Project
Diploma Plus teachers use strategies to raise student achievement and to re-engage students in their own learning. For example, teacher Elaine Senechal collaborates with her colleagues and community groups to combine standards-based instruction, interdisciplinary connections, project-based learning, cooperative learning groups, and the community as an extension of the classroom.
Senechal's science students at Greater Egleston Community High School learn design skills and science and math concepts through a community-based project. Senechal secured funding for her students to create a community peace garden on a vacant lot opposite the school. The project, part of a larger thematic curriculum promoting peace in the Egleston Square neighborhood and memorializing neighborhood young people lost to violence, offers opportunities for learning in earth science, botany, and landscape architecture. It also offers students a meaningful way to improve their immediate environment, exercise leadership in the community, and connect with local agencies and community groups.
Over the course of several months, students actively engage in a variety of activities simultaneously and construct their own knowledge of the subject material. While some students put the finishing touches on their individual designs, other students make scale drawings and three-dimensional models. At other points, students work in teams to collect soil samples for laboratory testing of lead levels. On other days, some students interpret lab results, while others research the effects of lead poisoning. Using guiding questions posed to individual students, small groups, or the class as a whole, the teacher challenges students to apply the knowledge that they already have to revise their work or take it to the next level and to incorporate their new understanding of the subject into their ongoing project activity.
Meanwhile, the activity in the peace garden connects to competencies that students know they must master. These competencies include understanding and experiencing the design process, collecting and recording data in ways that others can verify and analyze, understanding the structure and function of living systems, and understanding and using unary operations to solve mathematical and real-world problems.
Each student knows what the competencies are because the teacher explains them at the beginning of the school year. The teacher and students revisit the competencies periodically to help students identify the new skills that they have acquired and evaluate their overall academic growth. Most important, students know how they must demonstrate that they have learned each competency. Teachers use rubrics to assess students' grasp of content and acquisition of such skills as group work, problem solving, and oral presentation. Because students know what the teacher expects from them, they are able talk to their teacher about their performance.
Teachers collaborate with their colleagues to build interdisciplinary connections. For the peace garden project, students apply skills from science, math, and language arts, and they work on the project in several classes under the guidance of several teachers.
In Jumhoor Rashid's math class, for example, students must use their knowledge of proportions and measurement to calculate area and perimeter when they are working on their garden designs. In Kenny Vorspan's computer class, they develop a Web page about the larger themes of peace and remembrance and provide updates on the design and construction of the peace garden. Science teacher Senechal asks students to give presentations about the project to community audiences, for instance, summarizing their investigations into soil contamination or their garden design proposals. Senechal and Rashid coteach classes in which students keep garden journals to reflect on their visits to different gardens around the city. Keeping journals helps students improve their writing and develop analytical skills because they must think critically about what design elements make garden and park spaces pleasing. This interdisciplinary approach to teaching helps the students strengthen their skills in the content areas because it provides them with numerous opportunities to transfer their knowledge across the content areas.
Another key component of Diploma Plus is the use of community resources to enhance instruction. In the case of the peace garden project, a partnership between Senechal and a neighborhood association led to the funding that made the project possible in the first place. Through the project, the students worked with the association to survey neighborhood residents about their ideas for the site, sent soil samples to a government lab for analysis, assisted the surveyor, made presentations at community meetings, and consulted with a landscape architect to incorporate into a final design the best of their own ideas and the community's input. The students are particularly excited about these activities because they are relevant to the work that they are doing in the classroom. They no longer ask their teacher, Why am I learning this? They can see how their learning in the classroom is connected to their lives and is valued by the community.
Students are now completing a large, scale model of the garden and are awaiting the final transfer of the land from the donor before they begin construction. Students will help design the garden's peace memorial, and the garden will serve as an outdoor laboratory for students.
Early Results
Undertakings like the peace garden project reengage Diploma Plus students in learning and encourage them to assume responsibility for their education. The emphasis on competencies, in both instruction and assessment, instills high standards and expectations in both teachers and students.
These instructional approaches, along with a program design that expects students to perform successfully at the postsecondary level before they graduate, is having a dramatic impact on students' self-concept and on their academic and career goals. Most youth enrolled in Diploma Plus have had poor early academic experiences. Most do not see themselves as academic achievers. But once in the program, the young people understand that the teachers take them seriously as students and that the teachers will challenge them to achieve at high levels.
- In the 1998–99 school year, 63 percent of students in the plus phase of Diploma Plus earned a C or better in at least one credit-level college course. By the 1999–2000 year, this percentage had jumped to more than 75 percent.
- In a spring 2000 survey, 96 percent of plus phase students said that Diploma Plus made them more interested in attending college, and 81 percent of this group stated that their aspirations were greater now than they were before they started in the program.
- Seventy percent of the Diploma Plus classes of 1999 and 2000 enrolled in postsecondary institutions in the fall following graduation.
Diploma Plus helps previously struggling high school-aged students succeed. It offers students a high quality, engaging, and supportive learning environment that increasingly addresses the needs of an extremely diverse group of students. We look forward to sharpening these strategies and reaching more students in the future.
